PTR Back to Test Build
Another PTR build was pushed recently with no significant changes. This time it was a Test build, while the previous build was a Release Candidate. There is still plenty of time for the patch to go live by the Season 10 end date of November 29.

Statistics: Achievements and Honor Kills
All of the graphs today allow zooming in both the X and Y direction to allow you to take a closer look at areas of interest. As the US and EU sample sizes were not the same (~3.6 million vs ~2.7 million), the EU results were scaled up to the US sample size, allowing us to directly compare the results.

The first graph we are looking at today shows you how many characters have an achievement point total in the indicated range of achievement points. For example, the point of 1500 has 103,525 characters for the US. This means that out of the entire sample of the US, 103,525 characters have between 1500 and 1599 achievement points. This type of counting of characters also applies to the other two graphs.

You can see that US players seem to have more alts or casual players than the EU, but both experience that nice dip right before 9000 achievement points. This is due to the people that are close to It's Over Nine Thousand! achievement pushing to finish it. Both the US and EU have two main peaks, likely indicating the population of 85s that has run no dungeons and the part that has run some of the dungeons. This indicates that the majority of the sample does not play enough to get a large amount of achievements on all of their characters.

Moving on, the second graph has Honor Kills split up by faction, as there was no significant difference between the US and EU. It does appear that at the more casual end of the graph the Horde has a slightly higher amount, but once you get closer to the second half of the graph that gap shrinks to almost nothing. Only part of the range is shown, you can see the entire range is hard to look at. The entire range does show you that the gap of Alliance players is compensated for by the increase at the very low HK level. This indicates that the amount of casual players or alts that are PvPing is significantly higher than the people that play often.

The final graph breaks down the HKs by realm type, and you can see the players that have less HKs play on the PvE realms, while the players with more play on the PvP realms. Ths gap disappears once you go farther down the graph to the more serious players. The RP realms results look very similar to PvE realms and RPPvP realms look very similar to PvP realms. All of the factions and realms showed a nice bump around 100k HKs when people were going for the 100000 Honorable Kills achievement.

If you like this type of post or want to see something specific let me know in the comments!

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Account Security Warning: Steam Compromise

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

As some of you may know, Valve Software recently announced that certain Steam user account information was compromised by an illegal and unauthorized intrusion into their network. The statement from Valve on these events can be found here:

If you’re a registered account holder with Steam, we encourage you to review the information provided by Valve as soon as possible. We also recommend that you update your Battle.net password via Account Management (https://us.battle.net/account/management) should it be the same as or similar to the one you used for Steam or for the Steam forums. You may also wish to change your registered email address as a further security measure, or to change the password to your email account and other online accounts that might be at risk of compromise. If you are unable to update your Battle.net email address and/or password on your own, please contact our customer support staff for assistance: http://us.blizzard.com/support/webform.xml

Annual Pass with Parental ControlsBlizzard is sending out an email to people that have purchased the Annual Pass in Europe with Parental Controls enabled to confirm that the parent approves of the free copy of Diablo III due to its rating. If you purchased the Annual Pass and have Parental Controls enabled, you have until November 28 to reply to the email.

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Dear parent or guardian,

We are writing to you to let you know that the owner of a Battle.net account for which you have registered as the parent or guardian has signed up for the World of Warcraft Annual Pass promotion. This promotion offers a free digital copy of our forthcoming game Diablo III when players commit to a 12-month subscription for World of Warcraft.

However, as Diablo III has been rated as PEGI-16 (USK-16 in Germany), we are writing to you to let you know that this promotion will automatically be removed from the account on November 28, 2011. Once the promotion is removed from the account, the account holder will once again be able to modify their existing World of Warcraft subscription, including removing recurring payments.

If you instead wish to continue with this promotion and secure a free copy of Diablo III for the account holder when it is launched, please reply to this email before November 28, 2011 stating that you, as the parent or guardian, are happy to continue.

If you have any questions or further requirements, telephone numbers and further help from our Customer Support department can be found at http://eu.blizzard.com/support/.

Poll: Annual Pass
While we are talking about the Annual Pass, let us know if you decided to purchase it!

Can someone please explain to me why there are people complaining about the Annual Pass? I mean, short of people being stupid and signing up just to sign up what other reasons could you be unhappy with?

The way I see it, if you signed up for the annual pass without wanting Diablo 3 then you made a bad decision and have expendable income for mounts/beta keys so it shouldn't matter anyway. If you did sign up because you wanted Diablo 3 you essentially you got 6 months of WoW free. (Because buying Diablo would of cost you 6 monthsish of WoW sub) If you're complaining because now you've decided that Blizzard has detroyed all that is holy with their introduction of Pandas (/mindboggle) then what else do you have to lose?

And we all know 99% of these people complaining will buy the expansion, which means you would have resubscribed after so even if you would have quit between now and then you're not really out anything.

I love the offer, as far as I'm concerned it is Blizzard giving me a free mount, beta key and game for doing what I would have done the next year anyway.. been subscribed to WoW.

It's really simple, people who complain are those who don't have a credit card (and parent wont give theirs considering it's a 1 year contract) or those that aren't eligible to this offer. It's mostly jealousy in other words.

I signed up, cause I'll "play" for a year anyway, thanks to the automated guild leader change imposed by Blizzard in the next patch. Even tho I once took monthly breaks, I still probably paid for about 10 months a year anyway, so this is no drama for me to fork 12x12EUR. Diablo 3 is a nice addition, tho I will play it for sure, I don't think I will invest heavily into it. Beta access is also nice, it'll get some use (don't want to spoil myself before the actuall x-pac release) and the mount I don't care about.

I guess I'm just old fashioned, but there's no way in -hell- I'm committing to a hobby.

When you sign up for the annual pass you aren't really committing to anything.. You can stop paying any time you want, you'll just lose your extra privileges like the Diablo 3 license, the mount, and the beta key.. it's not like you are signing a contract and Blizzard will sue you if you don't pay...

Well, if you don't do heroic raids just normal modes and no meta-achievments, so simply if you're playing by not caring about achievments you will have about 2k if you're PvPing and PvE-ing too from the beginning of the game i guess. It's maybe not that accurare i have much more, just saying that achievments doesn't mean that you've been playing for not long ago, also i think people don't care about their alts' achievment and alts are in majority of the character-population in the game imo.

When you sign up for the annual pass you aren't really committing to anything.. You can stop paying any time you want, you'll just lose your extra privileges like the Diablo 3 license, the mount, and the beta key.. it's not like you are signing a contract and Blizzard will sue you if you don't pay...

Where does it say this? When I signed up for it, it said that the terms cannot be cancelled. Not sure what part it mentioned what you just did.

The only thing stopping me from doing it again is the lack of Statistics support in the new Armory API. The developers seem to have abandoned it.

Only 2,252 have between 10,500 and 10,600 achievement points. There are at least 15k+ that have more than you.

I remember the last bg breakdown. The problem was that queues didn't work properly until 4.2 released, the game was broken for the first half of Cataclysm. What I would like to see is exclusively data of bg's (and maybe also rated bg breakdowns if possible?) since 4.2 fixed the queue system. Anyhow, thanks for the stats that you do put up, they are all interesting and fun to read about.

Why scale EU when you could have ploted a % of total player base vs achieve points, and had comparable numbers from the get go. Scaling never makes things comparable.

As I do not plan on purchasing DIII there is no reason to spend more on a years subscription than necessary. 6 months is $77 and change, a year is double that $154- The years subscription with DII was $180 I believe. So what are you gaining if you do not plan on purchasing DIII, just a $27 mount.

This is a mixed list: Yes, No, I no Longer Play, Account isn't eligible.

Yes and No are the only real poll options, either you did or you didn't. You could "no longer play" and have purchased it, I am one of those people. So I should be able to choose Yes AND I no longer play. Account isn't eligible is a subset of no, and you're going to get mixed results. You'll get people who choose no because their account isn't eligible, you'll get those who choose account isn't eligible.

In the future it would be interesting if you broke out YES / NO with corollary WHY followups:
1. Yes, free diablo III and I'm not quitting wow as far as I can tell
2. Yes, free diablo III though I might not continue playing wow I can afford it.
3. Yes, I don't play wow now but might start again
4. No, my account isn't eligible
5. No, I quit wow for now.
6. No, I might quit wow soon.
7. No, don't care about this deal.

Is a far better poll than what you've presented. This mixed list just annoys me as one of the people who doesn't currently play wow but might return when the expansion comes out and is not effected by the cost. If the goal of this poll is to show the details, it fails. If it is meant to create fairly useless generalizations I guess it works.

Seeing as how even MMO-Champion doesn't get that much traffic...
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Originally Posted by balatro

There's already automated scripts being passed around on IRC and blogs encouraging people to rig the vote for this poll so if you see insanely high numbers of votes, you've been warned.

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Originally Posted by balatro

Originally Posted by Voidmaster

51k people got an annual pass already, just amongst the mmo-champ readers.51k is more than the total playerbase of some active mmo's out there, and there is a _lot_ of wow players who don't even know what mmo-champ is.So much for the "wow is dying" crap ;p

The poll is rigged, but not by mmo.

Polldaddy is one of the easier polls to "hack" and automated scripts are being passed around to control this very poll on IRC and some blogs. Just watch the numbers carefully and you'll notice some abnormal increases.

I don't know why any person(s) would want to bother rigging a poll done by MMO-Champion, but it may be a good course of action to either remove the poll or switch to another poll creation website with better security.

Buying CE for D3 and didn't want the annual pass. Per the math I would save more money going a 3 month commitment than giving them 14.99 a month for a game that I will probably uninstall the day I open D3 - that's IF it lives up to the hype. 6 years commitment to D2 and almost 7 to WoW and I didn't get a Beta... Shame on them.

As I do not plan on purchasing DIII there is no reason to spend more on a years subscription than necessary. 6 months is $77 and change, a year is double that $154- The years subscription with DII was $180 I believe. So what are you gaining if you do not plan on purchasing DIII, just a $27 mount.

I am sticking with the 6 month sub, it makes wow a little cheaper.

Actually, you could choose to pay for the Annual sub however you liked, as 1/3/6 month segments, just like a normal sub. So you could have paid for 2 6 month sub chunks just like your example, and still get all the freebies...

I don't know why any person(s) would want to bother rigging a poll done by MMO-Champion, but it may be a good course of action to either remove the poll or switch to another poll creation website with better security.

People do it for a multitude of reasons: For some, it's fun. Others want to bring awareness to the fact that PollDaddy is bad, etc.

PD is probably the largest of small scale survey websites, where as Survey Monkey is generally for more "important" surveys since they provide statistical analysis, etc.

A lot of radio stations and local organizations use PD for simple give a ways and contests --- these scripts are used to force a certain winner. For some reason, some people took it upon themselves to use it on this poll.

I don't think there has ever been an instance of Blizzard favoring PVP over PVE. Their concern is making sure everyone is busy enjoying all the new 4.3 stuff when TOR releases on Dec. 20th. November 29th is still going to be a couple of weeks earlier than expected. November 15th would have been ridiculously early; people would already be bored senseless of the new heroics in a month's time.

...

I don't know what kind of ratings the good players will be at immediately after the MMR reset, but the PVPers with a good PVE group are going to have a large advantage in the first few weeks of Season 11 if they get a weapon. You look at some of the other Dragon Soul drops that are going to be PVP BiS, to say nothing of the damned legendary that will still undoubtedly proc in PVP, and I don't think you'll find a PVPer who feels like they're being favored in the slightest.

What an excellent post. I could not say any better. The numbers show that many of casual players (3-5k points) have a significant number of Hk's. Why so? They cannot raid much or cannot raid at all.

I could only raid on weekends and it took me to stay awake till 4am. As someone who got something else beyond WoW I could not keep the pace as much as I wanted. So I turned to PvP. After hundreds and thousands of AVs/ABs/WSGs and nearly same rewards I quit the game and went to dying Warhammer. They have what I wanted - non-instanced neverending war with plenty of perks to work for. I am soooo pissed with rigid-minded GS and Kalgan who put us in a fixed bracket of "Raid is a top priority". It was so bloody simple to create a few World-PvP zones but they reluctantly refused doing that. Arena and raids - nothing else. And I was wondering what a rogue, ele shammy, frost mage and holy pal could do at arena? There were no team for four, our setup didn't look like a best win, and none of us was tempted to do arenas - we spent most of the time at BGs and WGs doing mass-pvp. Now all of us left the game. But we will go to Swtor.

The number tell us that even if the game is pve-oriented there is a huge demand for pvp and this should not be overlooked.

For those wondering why so many people answered "I don't WoW anymore" the answer is simple - we still love the game and wait forit to change and meet our demands.

Dang, I knew my old character (Deltrus of Zul'jin US) was one of few with 12,700+ achievement points, but only 400~ total US players in between 12.7k-12.8k is pretty crazy, and then the amount continues to drop as the points go up. Glad I managed to succeed so well in the time I played.

I found the charts quite cool, however I was wondering about some of the data. In particular the 100-200 achievement point range and only 1 person was in that range in the US? I know of at least a dozen in my guild alone that fit that categorization. Is there some other limiting factor to the data group, i.e. level restriction?